Elinore Pruitt Stewart

Quite by chance I came across this lady in someone else's blog, the author it seems of two books of letters from the early part of the 20th century, when life in the west of the US was still wild.

I got the one called 'Letter on an Elk Hunt', in the form of a photographic reproduction of a book which was once the property of the George Bruce Branch of the New York Public Library. It's arrival in Epsom also involved Houghton Mifflin, Forgotten Books and Amazon. The photography resulted in very large print, with the occasional page in a more regular print; we could not work out why this should have been so. But both that and the easy style of the writer made for an easy & pleasant read.

What I got was a short epistolary story of an Elk Hunt somewhere in the vicinity of Burnt Fork, Wyoming in the summer of 1914, just as the war in Europe was breaking out, I dare say there were people of Central Powers origins as well as of Allied Powers origins in Burnt Fork, which would have complicated their attitudes to the coming war. Just about the time that Scott was going to the South Pole and maybe twenty years before Downes was heading into the wastes of Canada (see reference 2). And a good fit with my established taste for tales of ventures into wildernesses of one sort or another.

But this one was a bit different in being written by a woman, not that interested in the Iron Man side of things, and who was apt to break out into all sorts of housewifely activities given the least provocation, usually in the form of a family in harder circumstances than she was herself. And life was certainly hard for homesteaders in the Wyoming of the time; one could just about scratch a living if there were not too many climatic, agricultural or other accidents.

All of which resulted in some tragedy, some resourceful self-sufficiency and some folk who were poor but proud and hard working. Life was hard and people knew they had to help each other if they were to survive - although I dare say they had their ration of the sturdy beggars who plagued early modern England. Perhaps they were the gun slinging cowboys of westerns.

Elk hunting seemed to be a reasonably common sport at the time of writing. This hunting party seemed to consist of half a dozen or so men, very mixed in their backgrounds, and rather fewer women. Transport was horses and carts, or perhaps one should say wagons. Women who, in addition to their regular domestic functions, were expected to be able to ride a horse, drive a wagon, make and break camp.

The hunt started off in the near desert, perhaps the high sierra of westerns, and then moved into the mountains where there were plenty of creeks, crags, trails and trees. No to mention snow.

The object was, I dare say, partly for the fun of it but also for the meat that came with the elks. Then there were also people who hunted the elk for their front teeth - elks having a few lower front incisors and two upper canines (stumpy rather than tusky), with all the rest of the teeth, the serious chewing teeth, much further back. These front teeth were and still are widely used for ornament - google finds plenty of it - and it was worth while at the time of this hunt to hunt elk just for their front teeth, abandoning the rest of the carcasses to scavengers. All very wasteful and, I think, illegal, game licenses and game wardens having been invented by the time of writing,

I wondered a bit about the letter writing. Were they really just letters to friends which found their way into a book by some chance, or were they always intended for publication? How did one find the time and energy to write them when holed up in the bad light of a tent in the wilds, after the labours of the day? To write them out twice, since the writer seems to have copies of them all. Where were the letter boxes?

I also thought to see what the digital public library of America (see reference 1) knew about the author, to get the answer not much, But they did offer good quality electronic versions of both books for free, including some introductory material which I did not get in my version. Introductory material which served to set the scene.

PS: I think this Burnt Fork is somewhere near Green River City, on the Green River in the south of Wyoming. A bit north of east of Salt Lake City, Still looks fairly wild now, but not so wild that they don't have streetview,

Reference 1: http://dp.la/ - the shortest internet address I recall seeing. Canadians and other Americans not of the US might be a bit peeved by the appropriation of the term 'America'.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/sleeping-island.html.